Reading, ignorance

The papacy, people say, counts in centuries, and perhaps never even thinks of counting, because its goal is eternity.¹

 
It has been a pleasure every few months to buy the latest volume in the new translation of À la recherche du temps perdu. I've now read the third, by Peter Bush. The Oxford World's Classics paperbacks are affordable, easy to hold open and, while the typeface is small, it's not too small. Overall, this is the ideal edition for those planning to read Proust in English for the first time and for those wanting to read a translation more faithful to the original than Scott-Moncrieff's, bountiful as it is.

The contents for each volume suggests another reason to recommend, coming as it does with extensive background information. Excluding Proust's titles, the table of contents looks like this:

• General Editors' Preface
• Translator's Note
• Introduction
• Note on the Text 
• Select Bibliography
• A Chronology of Marcel Proust
• Explanatory Notes. 

Compare this to the Penguin Classics paperback from the 1980s in which I first read Proust: while The Guermantes Way is 100 pages longer because of the larger typeface, it also includes Cities of the Plain, making it a bulky 1,100 pages.² Also, the table of contents lists (again, in addition to Proust's) only Notes, Addenda and Synopsis, with the notes filling three pages. The new edition has sixty-seven. The reader is directed to each note by an asterisk placed after a word. In a flurry of black snowflakes, there are often several to a page. If some provide detail of Proust's life to align the fiction to his biography, most explain the narrator's allusions, cultural references and the contemporary and historical events mentioned. This includes a veritable Who's Who of the fin de siècle French aristocracy, which is of course almost entirely unfamiliar to modern English readers. 

In two previous posts on the first volumes new translation, I express dismay at the unfamiliarity of the details, which I assumed exposed the shallowness of my first reading.³ In the new translation, Marcel's visit to the barracks at Doncières, his grandmother's decline and death, Albertine's brief visit to his home, his attendance at the salons of Mme de Villeparisis and the Duchesse de Guermantes, and the surprising turn taken in his call on the Baron de Charlus at the very end, are each very clear and memorable, yet almost entirely new to me. And then there is the seismic presence of the Dreyfus Affair splitting high society into two camps, which I do remember. But what did I know of it back then? Perhaps only visions of Steve McQueen in Papillon.

Nearly forty years later then, it was a different experience, a kind of disappointment, in that it was mostly intellectual, if not lacking the usual pleasures of reading, including laughs. In discussing de Charlus' excessive grieving over his late wife, the Princesse de Parme notes that "we sometimes do for the dead what wouldn't have done for the living", with which Mme de Guermantes concurs: "For one thing...we go to their funerals, which we never do for the living!" 

What this meant was that the breadth of space opened in my mind by Proust's long, luscious sentences as rendered, perhaps misleadingly, by Scott-Moncrieff, with, as Julia Kristeva puts it, their "odors, sounds, colors, shapes, tasty delicacies, and tactile pleasures", as well as arcane references proliferating across clause and sub-clause, in which one's thinking turns from a slog into a waltz, was not repeated.⁴ Had my young self been seduced then by the mere flourishes of an arch stylist? If I am appalled at myself for not being more attentive, for seeing the novel not only as a transcendent presence but as a guide to a life to come and the value of art, it is a recognition reflected in Marcel's own journey. I see that now. From a distance, he falls in love with the Duchesse de Guermantes solely on account of her family name only to be disillusioned upon getting to know her and the world she inhabits. We become enchanted with a certain work like In Search of Lost Time and wish to pursue it beyond the covers, perhaps by reading biographies and literary studies, by reading philosophers who influenced its ideas and the novelists inspired by its example or, if that isn't enough, by visiting the writer's house if they're dead or going to hear them talk at a literary festival if they're the living dead. 

What The Guermantes Way makes plain is that much of this research is unsatisfying, a dissatisfaction blurred like the sun through oceanic depths of information, and is also why many common readers will struggle with this part of the novel: there are hundreds of pages full of the twitterings of dinner parties, part of what Gilles Deleuze called the narrator's "apprenticeship to signs".⁵ According to him, there are four signs: worldly signs, the signs of love, sensuous signs, and the signs of art. The Guermantes Way offers a prolonged exposure to the first. Worldly signs constitute the language of an in-crowd. Maintaining one's place within it depends on making the right signs.

Nothing funny is said at the Verdurins', and Mme Verdurin does not laugh; but Cottard makes a sign that he is saying something funny, Mme Verdurin makes a sign that she is laughing, and her sign is so perfectly emitted that M. Verdurin, not to be outdone, seeks in his turn for an appropriate mimicry.

Deleuze is referring to another salon here but the signs apply across high society. While these signs are empty, their emptiness nevertheless "confers upon them a ritual perfection" in which everything is clear and known.  The signs of love, by contrast, confers a ritual of anxiety. The loved one "expresses a possible world unknown to us", one that we wish to enter and study with the intensity of a codebreaker. Nothing about the loved one is clear and knowledge is sought with trepidation. We seek facts as a painkiller only for it to turn into a knife under the ribcage, as we remain excluded, even, and especially, when the loved one gives us signs of preference. Thus, "the means we count on to preserve us from jealousy are the very means that develop that jealousy". We see this in serial form across the novel, from Swann's love for Odette, St Loup's for Rachel, and Marcel's for Gilberte and Albertine. The sensuous signs are those that have made In Search of Lost Time famous: the petite madeleine, the loose paving stone, etc. presenting an ecstatic truth without intellectual agency. Beckett guesses there are 12 or 13.

Involuntary memory is explosive, 'an immediate, total and delicious deflagration.' It restores, not mere the past object, but the Lazarus that it charmed or tortured, not merely Lazarus and the object, but more because less, more because it abstracts the useful, the opportune, the accidental, because in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works, and in its brightness revealed what mock reality of experience never can and never will reveal–the real.⁶

As with the signs of love, they demand interpretation and the signs of art constitute the 'Search' of Proust's title. The goal is to recover time wasted at dinner parties and time lost in love. Deleuze notes that the first three types of signs depend on material conditions while art is immaterial. In this way it is not subordinated to the experience of an individual and as such enables us to recognise its place in the plurality of experience. 

If Deleuze's analysis helps us to understand why it is especially challenging to maintain attention throughout The Guermantes Way, it may also help us to appreciate the difference between novels in general and the essential novel. That is, by applying Deleuze's signs to the culture of reading and writing about novels. We can see the critical apparatus given in the Oxford World's Classics edition as the worldly signs of reading novels. They enable us to place the reading experience in the context of literary history, the macro history of the author's time and the micro history of the author's life. They offer knowledge we can use to accommodate our response to the work and express it in public. We can see the overall series as a worldly sign: the edition presents world's classics and everything that phrase implies, acting like the bright pastel colours of supermarket fiction or the gothic filigree of YA Fantasy. Genre fiction makes a sign of pleasure and the reader makes a sign of enjoyment. Both are empty. This is why booklovers claim with an addict's panicked fervour that they devour books. We can also see the worldly signs in the framing of novels in The Guardian newspaper's book coverage.

What then are the signs of love? The stack above of Proust studies and Proust's writings in addition to the novel itself indicate my attempts to interpret the signs given by a reading of Albertine Asleep I heard in 1978 and the beloved beaten-up secondhand copy of volume one of Remembrance of Thing Past bought in 1987 for £3:10 (the minutae of infatuation). The means to travel closer to the work may be the very means of increasing distance. A magnificent distance nonetheless. 

The sensuous signs of reading are the most difficult to describe. It should consitute the focus of critical response. Gabriel Josipovici spoke of what Proust's novel does that other forms cannot.

I have never wanted to write poetry. So there must be things fiction can do that poetry can't.....This has something to do with time, with how human beings respond to time, with what time does to us, the losses it brings, and the sense of possibilities unrealized, but also the Proustian sense of sudden loops in time and the way our lives are sealed off to us but suddenly, in time, open up momentarily. 

This is close to my own experience of the essential novel. On a summer's day browsing bookshelves, anxious and passing time before a meeting, I picked up Peter Handke's Across and, reading the first line, I felt the dense air evaporate. Time disappeared, replaced in miraculous moment by time's essence. It's happened since in different ways and in different novels by different authors. One cannot seek them. They cannot be guaranteed. What Proust's example shows us is that we must create our own work, equivalent to In Search of Lost Time however feeble our resources in comparison to his. Weakness in this case should be considered the greatest strength. 

 

Notes

1: from The Guermantes Way. 

2. The title is Scott-Moncrieff's bowdlerised version of Sodom and Gomorrah, Proust's original title is restored in the Oxford World's Classics edition translated by Helen Constantine, published in June 2026.

3.  The Swann Way and In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom respectively.  

4. In Time & Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, translated by Ross Guberman. 

5. In Proust & Signs, translated by Richard Howard. 

6. In Proust by Samuel Beckett.